The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened to $77 million domestically and $156.6 million internationally for a $233.6 million global opening weekend, the fourth-largest opening of 2026, the highest-ever opening weekend for Meryl Streep at a domestic, international, and global level, and the first time a female-skewing studio film has led the first weekend of the summer box-office calendar. [1] [2] [3] CinemaScore graded it A-minus. Rotten Tomatoes returned 77% from critics and 87% from audiences. [4]

Anna Wintour did not get an A-minus from Streep. The seventy-six-year-old actor, who plays the Wintour-modeled fashion editor Miranda Priestly in the sequel that opened Friday, declined Wintour's co-chair invitation to Monday night's Met Gala, the same gala Wintour has run for thirty years. [5] Streep has never attended a Met Gala. The non-attendance is, in 2026, no longer a question of scheduling. It is a public statement, made in the weekend the studio paid eighty-million dollars to put her face on every available billboard from Times Square to the Sunset Strip.

The studio's marketing department spent four months coordinating Streep's press appearances around the opening. The press junket, the cover shoots for Vogue, the rounds with Kimmel and Colbert, the Today show couch — every appearance Streep made for the film was inside the same building Wintour has run since 1988. Vogue is the magazine the film is fictionalizing. The Met Gala is the magazine's annual fundraiser. Streep's "no" was for the gala, not for the magazine. The distinction is the heart of the weekend.

The film itself, directed by David Frankel, is reviewed as a sharper second look at a 2006 cultural moment that has aged in the wrong direction. Pauline Kael would have noted that the original Devil Wears Prada was a pre-recession comedy about a young woman who wanted into the fashion industry; the sequel is a post-recession comedy about a fashion industry that no longer has a center. The plot, by reviewers' consensus, follows Anne Hathaway's Andy Sachs as Runway's newly appointed features editor, with Emily Blunt's Emily Charlton now running Dior's U.S. operation, and Streep's Priestly trying to keep the magazine alive against a streaming-era media-buy collapse. [6] National Review's pan called the sequel "an abysmal sequel only the media class can enjoy." [7] BuzzFeed's review, less kindly, called it "the same movie, with PowerPoint slides." Audiences voted with the eighty-seven percent.

The numbers are larger than the studio asked for. Disney's mid-band tracking heading into Friday was $50-60 million domestic. The film over-performed by twenty-five percent. The international theatrical pool — UK $34 million, France $19 million, Germany $14 million, Australia $11 million, Japan $9 million — surprised even Disney's distribution analysts. [3] India, where the film over-indexed in Mumbai and Delhi multiplexes, contributed roughly $5 million in the opening four days. [8] The previous Streep international peak was Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again's $90 million worldwide opening in 2018. The Prada sequel beat that number by 159% on a single weekend.

What the box office cannot reach, the gala can. The Bezos-Sánchez honorary chair-ship of Monday night's Costume Institute exhibition, "Fashion Is Art," has already produced what the paper has called the Plural Absence Register. Mayor-elect Mamdani is skipping. Zendaya is skipping. Lauren Santo Domingo is sitting it out. The SEIU and the Strategic Organizing Center are staging a "Ball Without Billionaires" downtown the same evening. Streep's name added to that list, before her film opened, was the marker that the absence had reached A-list.

Streep's Reddit AMA Saturday night — promoting the film — answered the inevitable question without ducking it. "I never went," she said of the Met Gala. "I'm not going now. Anna knows." Her interview with Vogue earlier in the week was friendlier; she called Wintour "a friend, a peer, and the most consequential editor of her generation." [9] The two statements are not contradictory. Streep's distinction is between the editor and the gala, and between the magazine and its sponsors. The film makes that distinction less subtly. Disney is releasing it.

The marketing team's sequel-comeback narrative has a quieter undertow. Hathaway, forty-three, has spent the last fifteen years rebuilding her relationship with the audience that turned on her after the 2013 Oscars. Blunt, forty-three, came out of Oppenheimer with a clean sheet and turned the Charlton character — once the supporting bit — into a co-lead. Stanley Tucci's Nigel runs a small cameo as the magazine's editorial director. Tracie Thoms returns as Lily; Adrian Grenier did not. The cameo list runs to thirty-two names; Variety's published list includes Pedro Pascal, Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett, and Rihanna. [10] Disney is releasing the cameo list at theatrical pace — one per week through the European rollout — to keep the social-media graph alive into the summer.

The summer is the question. Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning opens May 23. Avatar 3 follows in July. The Prada sequel will not hold its weekend lead past Friday's opening. What it has already done, and what cannot be taken away, is open the summer with a female-skewing comedy at $77 million domestic. That is not a result the modern industry pretends to predict.

It is also, in case anyone forgot, a sequel to a movie about a magazine — released the weekend the magazine's actual editor would not be acknowledged on screen by the woman portraying her.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles